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I was reading HN comments yesterday shitting on modern IBM for being a non tech consulting company that has not innovated since the mid nineties.
I was reading HN comments yesterday shitting on modern IBM for being a non tech consulting company that has not innovated since the mid nineties.
More like mid-2000s, even with the least charitable interpretation. There was a time when IBM dominated console CPUs for a massively successful generation (PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii).
PS3 used the Cell processor but it’s debatable how much that was an asset vs handicap. Total PlayStation sales dropped for that generation vs both PS2 and PS4. The manufacturing costs didn’t fall nearly as fast as expected and it was a poor fit in terms of cross platform development etc.
PS4 moved to AMD.
I was reading HN comments yesterday shitting on modern IBM for being a non tech consulting company that has not innovated since the mid nineties.
More like mid-2000s, even with the least charitable interpretation. There was a time when IBM dominated console CPUs for a massively successful generation (PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii).
IBM stopped building servers based on x86 because the margins were too thin for their tastes, but they never stopped building on top of POWER and Z.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More like mid-2000s, even with the least charitable interpretation. There was a time when IBM dominated console CPUs for a massively successful generation (PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii).
Xbox 360 used an Intel CPU. PS3 used the Cell processor but it’s debatable how much that was an asset vs handicap. Total PlayStation sales dropped for that generation vs both PS2 and PS4. The manufacturing costs didn’t fall nearly as fast as expected and it was a poor fit in terms of cross platform development etc. PS4 moved to AMD.
No. It was a PowerPC based one called, IIRC, Xenon.
I was reading HN comments yesterday shitting on modern IBM for being a non tech consulting company that has not innovated since the mid nineties.
well that's nonsense. IBM does incredibly cool stuff. https://research.ibm.com/blog
Is this like the Transmeta processors doing code translation in hardware?
No, this is more like any modern processor, which translates instruction codes into micro-ops. To over-simplify IBM just has two of these units per thread rather than one.
If you haven't already.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They were pretty clear at Hot Chips that it's native
"code translation in hardware" microcode is called "native"
Transmeta was a classic failure--right idea, wrong place & time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xbox 360 used an Intel CPU. PS3 used the Cell processor but it’s debatable how much that was an asset vs handicap. Total PlayStation sales dropped for that generation vs both PS2 and PS4. The manufacturing costs didn’t fall nearly as fast as expected and it was a poor fit in terms of cross platform development etc. PS4 moved to AMD.
> Xbox 360 used an Intel CPU. No. It was a PowerPC based one called, IIRC, Xenon.
Xeon vs Xenon
I had always assumed with chip names that similar it was an Intel product. How on earth didn’t they get sued?
Huh. ARM instead of ppc64le?
IBM mainframes are almost designed by their users. The previous generation skipped a lot of speed boost on the CPU side because their users didn’t want the machine to blow over their power delivery limits.
Now, with their architecture behind it, I’m sure these ARM Linux partitions will have the fastest ARM cores ever made. My experience with Linux on s390x is that it feels like a normal server that’s just ludicrously fast - almost as if it came from the future.